Reviewed by Ekaterina Timofeeva, University of Jyväskylä

The thirty-six contributions in this volume were selected from more than two hundred proposals by the participants of the Sixteenth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association at Pretoria, South Africa, in 2000. The volume is aimed primarily at specialists in particular literatures, literary generalists, and comparativists. The common goal of the series is to create a comparative literary history of Romanticism that views literature as a part of cultural life.

The volume is thematically organized in three parts. In the eight chapters of Part 1, ‘Characteristic themes’, the authors deal with contextual approaches to Romanticism to address two major issues: (i) how narrative fiction was influenced by the political, social, and cultural context of Romantic period; and (ii) how certain themes were represented through the literary prism or literary context of Romanticism. For instance, Gerhart Hoffmeister, focusing on three seminal novels by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo and seeing the French Revolution as a cultural revolution, identifies similarities in the narrative treatment of the Revolution as well as in the importation of history into fiction. Wilhelm Graeber traces the evolution of the semiotics of nature and landscape in the Romantic prose that proceeds from the representation of the foreign exotic landscapes to the sublime beauty of the landscapes of home, thus evoking a sense of national identity.

Part 2, ‘Paradigms of Romantic fiction’, is divided into two subsections. Subsection A is devoted to the generic types of Romantic fiction. Hendrik van Gorp approaches the Gothic novel as a Romantic genre, whereas Sven Halse provides a cross-cultural analysis of the idyll. Subsection B, which consists of eight chapters, is devoted to describing discursive patterns of Romantic fiction, raising such popular current topics as community, otherness, homophony, and polyphony. Part 3 traces the influence of Romanticism on nineteenth and twentieth century writing and thought. Particularly, the chapters of this part look into the interface between the Enlightenment, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism with Romanticism in light of its spread beyond Europe. For instance, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami explores the Japanese version of Romantic prose, while Jüri Talvet and José Ricardo Chaves, in their respective chapters, deal with the features of Romanticism in Latin America.

Despite its impressive size, the 700-page volume still does not include all the contemporary perspectives on Romanticism, and the editors frequently acknowledge that such an intent lies outside their scope. Nevertheless, approaching Romanticism from a comparative cross-cultural perspective, this book is a valuable collection and an indispensable resource for scholars pursuing research in Romantic literature.